Haneefah Adam is a Nigerian multidisciplinary artist whose practice spans across food art, painting, sculpture, installation, photography, textile (embroidery), and digital illustration. She is internationally recognised for her pioneering art with food. Adam uses a range of media to explore themes of identity, memory, culture, motherhood, and representation, often drawing from her personal experiences as well as the socio-political landscape of contemporary Africa.
She is a self-taught artist with a background in medical sciences. Adam holds an MSc in Pharmacology and Drug Discovery from the University of Coventry, UK. Her work gained early acclaim when she won the #TechMeetsArt competition in 2016, leading to her participation in Rele Art Gallery’s collaboration with Samsung West Africa.
Her opening solo exhibition, Life Long Percussion at Angels and Muse, Lagos, in 2018, has since been widely exhibited, including at Her Story (Rele Art Gallery, 2018), Impart Art Fair (2019), A Changing Landscape: The Female (Van Der Plas Gallery, New York), and as an ANF Creative Fellow (2022).
Historically, African market women have shaped the circulation, aesthetics, and economic meaning of the Ankara fabric, portraiture embedded in repetitive pattern systems; the portraits reframe textile design as an archive of labour, memory, and authorship. Her ongoing work,” What We Carry,” blends collaborative studio approaches with sculpture and installation to interrogate memory, transformation, and emotional labour, centring women within these repeating fields of pattern, repositioning them as authors within a visual economy they helped sustain. The repetition that surrounds operates as accumulated labour; each motif functions as a unit of memory, inspired by what they sell, making the patterns an archive. Who is recorded in the fabric of global modernity? Whose labour circulates without recognition? By situating portraiture within textile-based abstraction, the paintings reposition African women as economic and cultural authors within transnational systems of design and trade.
In 2024, she was awarded The Future Awards Africa Prize for Art and featured on the Keep Walking: Africa Top 30 List in the art category in 2023. Her work has appeared in CNN’s African Voices, BBC, Financial Times, and more. She has collaborated with global and regional brands including Google, PepsiCo, Nestlé, Islamic Relief UK, MTN, Dangote Salt, and the United Nations Refugee Agency.